Why won’t God heal amputees? Yeah, God! What’s up with that? How come the lepers get all the healing?
“Can I just take your credit card number, Mr Ayatollah?”
Bad Hollywood movies don’t usually register much on my radar: I mean, Kirsten Dunst actually makes a living ‘acting’ in movies; that alone brings down my expectations of the film industry by about 800%. Bad movies are par for the course. But this movie, for some reason, absolutely horrifies me. The thought of being forced to watch it gives me a little frisson of genuine terror. It’s so insulting and so wrong on so many levels I scarcely know where to begin. If Sony Pictures is this desperate for cash, can’t they invest in a Thai brothel or a third-world sweatshop or something and spare me the agony of having to watch the trailer over and over again? Must they be so cruel? I will, however, admit to being mildly amused by the catchline: “To hide from the law, this little criminal has to act like a big baby.” That’s the feeblest attempt at a joke I’ve ever seen outside a Dubble Bubble wrapper. It’s like the copywriter went “Ah, screw it. I’m not even going to try to make this seem funny.” I think it would have been better if they’d really phoned it in: “Diminutive miscreant assumes guise of toddler to avoid detection by authorities. To comedic effect.”
Another recent conversation (drunk this time, not stoned):
“You had a scooter?”
“Yeah, it was awesome. It was white with a big ‘No Fat Chicks’ sticker–“
“A ‘No Fat Chicks’ sticker? Fuck off. That is such retarded, frat asshole bullshit. And look at you! You’re not exactly skinny. You put the ‘hippo’ in ‘hypocrite.’ … Whoa. Dude, I think that’s like the funniest thing I’ve ever said.”
I now present a list of my weird food things, so that you don’t commit any egregious faux pas should we ever have dinner together. Everyone has weird food things (like my friend back in Canada who picks the tendons out of chicken wings. Does that make them less disgusting or more disgusting? The jury’s still out), though I used to pride myself on being the world’s least fussy eater – after surviving my mother’s tuna casseroles throughout my childhood, not to mention my father’s perverse habit of stewing currants in porridge until they disintegrated into mush, I figured I could happily ingest pretty much anything. But in recent years I’ve run the dietary gamut from vegetarian-except-fish to vegan to borderline anorexic (at one point I would only eat whole foods and would not touch ANYTHING that had been processed, including bread and fruit juice) to living exclusively on microwave pizza. I’ve now reached a relatively sane balance, but somewhere along the way I picked up some very particular aversions.
For example, I cannot abide breakfast foods, except occasionally eggs. No cereal, no oatmeal, no bagels, no pancakes. I usually eat sandwiches for breakfast.
I don’t like tomato sauce. It is bland, and therefore hateful. Whole tomatoes are OK; tomato juice is OK; tomato sauce is not, except on pizza. Tomato sauce with rice in any context is right out.
Pine nuts: no. As SiC says, they are overused by lazy chefs attempting to create haute cuisine. A handful of pine nuts does not make a bowl of pasta ‘gourmet’. It makes it taste like pine nuts.
Coconut curries are good for about three bites. Then they become nauseating.
Weirdest of all, I no longer have any desire for sweets. I don’t know how this happened: historically, I’ve been known to eschew eating for a whole day so that I could have an entire bag of cookies for supper. All I know is that at some point last year, my sweet tooth vanished (I think it was during the three months or so after I moved to London, during which I was pretty much continuously hung over), to the point where even the smell of chocolate now makes me feel queasy. Ice cream, cake, candy? DEAR GOD NO. I can only consume sweetness in liquid form (like a hummingbird!). Even fruit is pushing it. Savoury only for me, please.
My biggest food thing is that I can’t stand to have anyone comment on what I’m eating, even politely. It makes me feel strangely defensive. I try to eat alone whenever possible so that this does not happen. If I choose to pour half a bottle of hot sauce over my mashed potatoes that is MY BUSINESS, y’hear?
Aren’t I the chatty one today! Just a bit more, lest I breach the limits of your attention spans. This is my last day at the latest temp job. I’m currently wrangling with various predatory recruitment agents to find something else post-haste, though my desire to learn yet another boring list of procedures that will become useless to me in three weeks is minimal. My cranial storage space is finite and I don’t want to squander it. However, I have to eat. Preferably off in a cave somewhere.